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The Pilot Project Podcast is an aviation podcast that aims to help new pilots learn what it takes to succeed in the world of flight, to help people in the flight training system learn what they may want to fly, and to give Canadians and the world a peek into life on the flight deck in the RCAF. We want to help pilots succeed and thrive! We interview real RCAF pilots for their exciting stories as well as the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll learn their tips to develop resilience and the tools it takes to make it in flight training.
THIS TRANSCRIPT IS AI GENERATED AND WILL CONTAIN SOME SMALL ERRORS. IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS PLEASE CONTACT thepilotprojectpodcast@gmail.com. We understand the importance of good subtitles but currently as a one-person operation we just don't have the ability to edit these in a timely fashion and keep episodes coming out regularly. Thank you for your understanding!
All right, we're ready for departure. Here at the Pilot Project Podcast, the best source for stories and advice from the pilots of the RCAF. I'm your host, Bryan Morrison, and with me today is Pete Musters. Pete graduated from flight training in 2014 at three C FFTs and was posted to 408 Tactical Helicopter Squadron in Edmonton, Alberta, flying the Ch 146 Griffin. He was involved in two Oplentis deployments, which is our domestic response operation to the fires in La Range, Saskatchewan and Fort McMurray, where he was on the night reconnaissance team. He conducted a tour in Iraq in support of coalition operations for Operation Impact in 2017. He is a qualified mental flying performance coach, human performance and Military Aviation Coordinator, flight Safety Investigator, Caf Sentinel, and a recent rotary wing course director. By 2018, he was posted at three CFFTS in Portugal's Prairie, where he is still teaching on the Bell 412 as call sign Outlaw 81. Welcome to the show, Pete.
Thanks very much, Bryan
One of the things that's really neat about you is most of us, a lot of us, we don't have like, a past life. We joined the military when we were 17 or 20, so we don't have past careers. But that's not the case for you. You've actually done some other things in life. And you were a teacher before, right?
I I've lived a few lives before now. Yeah, that's right. I was a, uh, I was a high school teacher. I taught in New Zealand. I taught in Alberta. And I taught in Ontario.
So you taught high school, what grade?
It was grades nine through twelve and it was a bunch of different subjects, all the ones that there's no right answer for. And I think that carries over flying very well.
But what brings you from teaching high school to deciding it's time to join the Air Force?
Uh, well, I had my application for five years straight and they weren't taking any direct entry officers. Didn't matter how qualified you were. I had 1100 hours of flying and I just ate, sleep, breathing.
How much?
1100 hours.
They wouldn't take you?
No. Oh, wow. And I had just got my commercial pilot license. I was a flying bomb before then. Flying all over the world, just, uh, gliding and towing.
So basically you had your application in while you were teaching and you were just waiting for it to come along?
Yeah, 100%.
And you were kind of already getting into the next thing I wanted to know, which is basically like, where did flying start for you?
So, my mom was an art dealer when I was really little. She did really well dealing art and I remember this beautiful painting of Roy Brown chasing Manfred von Richtofen chasing WAP May over the First World War battle lines. And I was like, wow, that's really interesting. And it was in this art book. And so it got me interested in history and the stories of the people who were involved in aviation. And I, uh, was just hooked.
You were in the cadet Flight program 100%.
Yeah. Spent a lot of time doing that. I loved it.
So many of us seem to get our start in the cadet flying program.
I think it's about a third of people who joined the military had some sort of an interest in cadets before they started. And I'm still interested in cadets. It's an awesome program.
You mentioned a bunch of other flying outside of the military. So you had 1100 hours. How did you get those? Were they gigs, or were they just sort of scrounging hours where you could.
Or kind of passion projects? And I still like doing those. I joined a group called youth Flight Canada Education Fund, and they also ran a group called Freedom's Wings. So we did flying for youth who needed a little bit of a hand up. And then the other part of it was a program teaching people with disabilities how to fly in Canada's first accessible gliders. So they rigged up gliders, uh, with hand controls for people who were paraplegic.
So was that essentially like the rudder instead of a throttle kind of idea?
Yeah, because there's no throttle in the glider. The spoilers operated with the left hand just through some detents, and the left and right rudder, it was a push pull on the on, uh, the bell crank.
How did you end up involved in these kinds of things?
I love flying. I totally love flying. And there were a lot of people who helped me get to the point of where I am today. Aviation is interesting, but what's more interesting is helping other people grow, learn, become more confident in a skill, and enjoy this really beautiful moment in nature. Uh, whether it's powered or not powered is kind of beside the point for me. But sharing the human joy of aviation, that's my jam.
That's awesome, man. Vic and I talked when I interviewed Vic about how amazing gliding is. We both kind of said it's like a very pure experience in terms of flight.
It is. You're listening to nature. You're occupying this small, beautiful moment of space and time, and when you land on Earth, it's still the same thing. So just makes you think a little bit about, what are you doing? Is it worthwhile? How can you do it better?
Yeah, absolutely. So you what year did you join?
October of 2010.
So then you went and did BFT. And did you do the Harvard or the Grobe?
Yeah, I did the Harvard and Moose Jaw. I led from the rear 16th out of 16th of uh, my course.
Hey, man, p is for Pass, right? P is for pilot.
P is for pilot.
Sure.
I wanted to be a jet person, and they said, no, Pete, that's not for you. And I couldn't agree more.
I was going to say, you agree with that assessment?
Yeah, absolutely. 100%. It was humbling. I learned a lot, and yeah, there's a lot of resilience in there that, uh, I learned. I also have a lot of healthy respect for people who struggle to make all those grades that are difficult and, um, given me a lot of empathy, uh, while I'm an instructor myself.
So phase two was tricky. And how did Phase Three go for you?
Much, uh, better. By the time I hit Phase three, the people who were instructing me, I felt like they're very practical, super, super experienced, and deeply wanting to teach that next degree of airmanship and what things would be like in their community. That was a huge motivator.
And that's something that comes up over and over again, is airmanship and mentorship. I suspect it will come up over and over and over because it's just such an, uh, absolutely key thing in aviation.
And there's so much to learn with airmanship, so many different aspects to it.
I, um, don't think there is such thing as mastering it, because I think.
If you think that you've mastered any particular flight, that you think it was perfect, you need to hang up the keys for a day, go for a long walk, because you missed something. Yeah, for sure.
There's no doubt. So you finished Phase Three, and you said that went much better, and you got selected for Taco. Was that what you wanted?
Oh, uh, where does Elizabeth need be?
That is the right attitude to take. And that is kind of the key to happiness in the Air Force. Right. You can be miserable anywhere, and you could be happy anywhere. It just really depends on what you decide you're going to be.
Yeah, 100%. I think I had asked for search and rescue, but I was happy to go wherever I really wanted to do some work with whoever needed support from the air directly. And Sara and Tackle both were filling that.
So you were good with that?
Yeah, it was.
You finish here in Portage, you get selected tackle, and you're off to Edmonton. And of course, you are going to head to Gage Town, next right, for training in, uh, New Brunswick. So what's the course called there?
It's called tapo. So tactical first officer course. Okay.
And they're basically taking you from a guy who can fly a Griffin well, a Bell 412, to a guy who can tactically fly a Griffin.
Yeah. So think of it this way. At Southport, you learn how to fly the aircraft. When you go to Gauge Town, you learn how to fight the aircraft. How can I work with somebody else? How do I understand the threat environments a little bit. How do I fly low to the ground and fast, and stay at 15ft in, uh, day or night and think about terrain and how to ingress and egress and all that?
Was it fun?
Yeah, absolutely, it was fun. It was primarily people who had just come back from Afghanistan as, uh, our teachers and they really knew their stuff.
I mean, the tack hill wing, the experience they had in Afghanistan is immense.
Yeah, they've done Afghanistan, and then after that there's a lot of tours in Iraq, and then after that it was Maui. Uh, and they've still done the Atlantis stuff the whole time through. They don't stop, they just go, go, go.
You're kind of in the army world of the Air Force. So how did you find that?
I thought it was really interesting. They're really quite good about embedding their first officers who are getting their time up as first officers, whether it's the logistics people or it's three PPCLI, or it's the artillery or the dragoons or whatever. Yeah. So you go learn what the users need you to do, and if you can't do what they're asking you to do, you have no business being on the battlefield.
That cross understanding of each other's jobs. It's so important, uh, in joint ops.
Right, of course, just to have a context of what is it that other people do and to appreciate what they do, and to realize that it's not about you, it's about the team.
Well, you can't do these jobs in a bubble. You can't be a pilot who only cares about pilots who you can, but.
You do it very badly.
You won't do well. No, you're not going to be doing your job well. No, this job comes down to teamwork, and you have an obvious set of end users within the army. But, uh, every pilot works with maintainers, and the best feeling is when you go on a debt and the maintainers and the flight crew start to integrate and they want to work hard to see you go get that mission done and you see how hard they're working and you want to go get that done. And so you expand that and do what you're talking about. And I think that's a great thing.
100%.
Once you finish your course in Gauge Town, what's the, uh, training and upgrade process?
Like, you go back to your squadron and you're qualified then for domestic operations, but you need a lot of work up training to be competent at even just the level to be a first officer overseas. But as a first officer, you're trying to keep the shiny side up and make sure you're not going to hit lead. And you have to be competent at doing the kinds of maneuvers that are required to avoid enemy air defenses, if there are any. That's enough to start, at least that's what you're training for. And then the actual environment that you go into could be very different from what you're training.
Yeah, of course. Is it a one stage upgrade? Do you just go FOAC or force?
Uh, I'll just call it like a domestic aircraft captain, which is the point I reached before I went to roaring instruction. That's the point where, here's an aircraft, go do some task from point A to point B. Uh, moving some people in Canada, and then the next level is, okay, you're learning to be an aircraft captain in a tactical environment, which is that's a whole different can of worms.
Where do you think that new pilots tend to struggle in tackle? What's challenging?
I'm not sure that it's Griffin specific or tackle specific. I think just in general, it's decision making and growing. That situational awareness, because a lot of our training, through no fault of the pilot candidate or the person who's learning, a lot of the instruction is canned. And we need to get out of that environment to give people some room to grow, some room to fail and make failures in an environment where there's not a lot of consequence and they can grow and learn from it. I'm sure that you've gone and made mistakes when you've been training or learning, or maybe you were the aircraft commander at the time, but you learn a whole lot from making those mistakes. Absolutely. Way more than you ever would learn from doing things well.
Yeah, I mean, it's great to do well, but the trouble is, in my opinion, it's not a great thing if you have a super, super smooth training experience, because now you're making all your first mistakes on your own as an upgraded AC. And that can be a big mental hurdle to jump over on top of the stress of just trying to sort out, what do I do now?
Yeah, I'd say that's the major thing. And that's not just me. I think that's with everyone, that situational awareness part, it takes time to grow and learn that there's no other way but spending time in a state of confusion where you're like, okay, I got to just return to the basics. What radio is important to listen to just goes right back to aviationavigate communicate. And then if the plan ever goes sideways, 90 plus percent of the time, it's probably the comms that have got screwed up in some way.
So in tackle, how army do you guys get? You hear a couple, like, cliches about tackle. You hear me?
The army?
Yeah. You hear there's no hell like tackle.
That's true.
How true are those things? Like, how army do you guys go? How much, uh, weapons training do you guys do?
Two or maybe three times a year. You do weapons training, uh, with what? You've got a second world war. Nine millimeter Browning. Made by the English Washing machine company.
It's a classic.
Right? And then, uh, you get the C eight. Super fantastic firearm.
That's the carbine, right, of the C seven.
Yeah. And then your door gunners have a.
C Six, which is our seven six two GPMG. A carbine is a shortened version of a standard infantry rifle and is ideal for vehicle or aircraft crew. A GPMG is a general purpose machine gun.
Yeah. What's really awesome is that for the tackle crew that's flying, we, uh, always have a door gunner, and the door gunner is a non commission member from an army unit.
I love the army guys. Love you guys. I've worked with a lot of guys who are ex army, and they're amazing. I really appreciate their insights into leadership. They live it. It's not lines in, uh, a manual for them. They live leadership and responsibility and fitness and all these things that really, really matter to the military on a day to day basis. You flew with a buddy of mine as a door gunner, Cam Davidson.
Yeah, absolutely. Uh, Lord Strathcona. Yeah.
He's a wonderful guy.
Yeah. I would say the same thing about every door gunner that I've ever flown with. Actually, pretty much everybody I've ever flown with. It's super helpful to have someone who knows the army component and understands what the army needs as one of your supporting people. Right.
Will he translate army for you?
100%. Once we reach level of army, they help figure that out. You'd be a fool not to listen to the people who that's their thing.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's your SME, right. You're subject matter expert.
100%. You listen to those people. You listen to them real good. And if you don't, you're going to be a fool.
You have two choices as a pilot. You can ignore all the advice that your crew gives you, and it will bite you, and they will stop trying to help you. Or you be a team player.
Yes. They're an awesome asset.
What would you say was your best day on the Griffin in Tack Hill?
I've had a lot of them. I was at the Fort McMurray Fires with a really, really experienced flyer. He was on everything from the Edmonton SWAT police to he is a 15 fighter pilot before, and a JTAC, and oh, wow.
A JTAC is a joint terminal air controller, otherwise known as a forward air controller. In many countries, their job is to direct close air support in combat situations from a forward position.
He knew everything, and he was mentoring me as we went here. And we flew the perimeter of the Fort McMurray fire, and we flew it every night. And we marked all the hotspots and drew it on both a digital and a, uh, paper map so that in the morning, the provincial planning team for where they're going to send their air assets and their ground assets. When they woke up in the morning, we were handing them a map of what the fire looked like in near real time.
Were you guys doing that by eyeball or did you have Flurr or something?
We had flur available and I was the guy who knew how to work it. But our night vision goggles were more.
Than adequate and just flare as forward looking infrared. What was that like to go into a place like that with that level of kind of chaos?
The place looked like hell. It literally was. Everything, uh, was on fire. The places that we were staying, we weren't sure if we could stay there. We were looking at major parts of the city and what was going to go up and what wasn't. Um, just to know that we had provided some situational awareness for the provincial fire team to decide where they were going to allocate their assets, that made me feel really good.
Yeah, that must have been really rewarding to be able to, in a concrete way, help people who are going through that kind of stuff.
It was awesome. It really felt good.
So that's your best experience, your most rewarding experience. What was your hardest day on the Griffin?
What was my hardest day on a Griffin? Overseas? When I was in Iraq, the climate was awful. It was 50 Celsius some days. And we're wearing two layers of clothing inside a dark helicopter that is a greenhouse. And we were just baking. It was warm.
It's miserable.
Yeah. Balmy. Yep.
I had a similar experience during the pre flight checks and stuff in Kuwait. Flying for the same opinion in Iraq. 55 degrees. Nightmare. Nightmare. Getting ready for a flight. But you guys are not pressurized.
You're flying low and, uh, there's no air conditioning.
Can you roll the window down or no.
So what I can tell you is that for a long time, dr. DC had been looking at like, okay, how do we cool down our our crews? And they thought, oh, well, we've got this, um, we've got this cooling suit that our tankers use. But they were like, oh, well, operational airway to this authority. Well, we can't wait for that. So what are we going to do? And a typical Canadian genuity are, uh, the people before us had come up with this plan of you will fill the fridges and the freezers with water bottles, and you will take as many of them as you can with you. And we would put them inside our armored vests under our armpits and those will keep you cool.
It works, man.
And then once they've warmed up, you can drink them and then you toss those. Put another couple in. Right. Um, the other one was, uh my daughter had her second birthday while I was away.
That's really hard.
Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure that she really noticed hard for me at age two, but I felt like I really wanted to be there and, uh, I couldn't. But that's kind of the life we live, right?
Yeah.
It is.
But it's hard though. We know this is coming. We know that this is part of the job, but it is hard. It is hard to be away from your family. It is hard when your wife is dealing with something that you would normally help with and you can't because you're not there or your kid has a milestone or whatever.
Yeah, well, it's all relative to the, uh, people who are doing the real work at the front lines, kinetic with some really terrible humans. That's a hard job. I was really relatively quite having a good day every day.
When you regularly have a reminder of real war, it puts your own hardships in perspective. Any day that I had over Iraq was better than people on the ground fighting's. Best day. I was up there sipping on a Diet Coke, watching the tracers. Uh, that's a fine day. Day to day. What does life look like on a squadron? How much can you expect to fly?
How often for First Officer anyway, you come into work 730. We go to met brief, we hear some intelligence reports, uh, we talk about, you know, what our fleets looking like for the day. There are some words from the Co, maybe some things on world events. And then after that, the first few missions will start launching. There's usually something to do for either mission development or some sort of thing that junior people can knock along to, whether it's, uh, a, uh, training event or learning about some aspect of tackle or you'll have a professional development thing that you're going to be working on. And then in the afternoon, or vice versa, you'll have a flight.
Do you guys have a lot of book work?
There is as much work to keep you busy as you can find. And professional, uh, people who are developing, um, they take the time to do it.
I found that one of the hardest things about your first few years operational is that constant slog. There's years of being on the Aurora where every night I would probably be doing a little bit more system review or prepping for a SIM. Right. There's just so much to know.
Yeah, there always is.
It's a constant slog, but you find some interesting and as you gain understanding, it can be rewarding. And I found that motivating, but it is tough.
Well, the motivation for me was there's really no telling what the heck you're going to go up against. So you better know as much as you possibly can. You don't want to find yourself in a spot that you weren't prepared for. Nobody thought we were going to Afghanistan. Nobody thought we were going to Maui. Nobody thought we were going to Iraq. And then it happened.
I had a very similar experience. Very sudden deployment. You go from hunting subs to doing surveillance work over the desert. Very jarring, but you got to be ready.
Well, in your defense. I mean, not a lot of submarines decide to show up in the sandbox.
I didn't find one sub in Iraq. They were scared, I think. So can you tell me any more about what life was like there at all to give people an idea of sort of what is deployed life like with tackle? And you guys have really been in the desert for the last 20 years.
I had a pretty sweet deployment. Uh, sure. It was 55 Celsius.
Were you guys in, uh, tents or hard shelters?
They were hard shelters. We had air conditioning and Wi Fi.
We we had that, too. And I was shocked.
That was incredible. That is not how many people have had wars before. It was pretty pretty cushy.
What was the op tempo like?
I was pretty busy. You'd fly most days, but you got used to it. And, uh, man, hats off to the, uh, PSP staff for having us work out.
You guys had PSP up there?
Yeah, they were great.
That's awesome. Good for them.
They got us in shape real quick, man.
If there's ever though an opportunity to get jacked, it's on tour.
I was with some army guys, our, uh, door gunners, and they competed to see how much muscle they could put on. And I had all these Lord Strathcona guys who really were jacked and could do ten times what I could. So, yeah, I had to step it up.
Do you have a call sign?
I had a major who assigned me the chef, uh, because I cooked an engine.
That's beautiful.
Yeah, I cooked it real good.
How did you manage that? What's the story there?
I had a weak battery, high density altitude, and we had just started a new procedure where we had to call into a tower to request permission to start. And that drains the battery down further before you hit the starters. Anyway, long story short, I did not do those things that I hadn't yet learned because it's not a part of the checklist. It's just like just an expertise thing. Yes. So I did what you're supposed to do also and turn off the fuel line. But it takes a long time for that whole fuel line to drain. By the time it did, I had basically made magma out of, um, million dollar engine. So I make sure it's this day to tell that story to everybody so that we don't make more magma.
Well, we all make mistakes, and that was just an expensive one.
Yeah. The last thing I'll say is you have to approach your learning and everything, I think, in aviation, let alone in the military, with a sense of humor. Otherwise, you're just not going to do well. So I was on my way home from this hot start. I feel terrible, but the taxi's got to pull the engine here. Everyone is back at the hotel, and they're waiting to fire up this barbecue and get all the food going for the night. And I'm walking in and looking at them, they can't figure where the on button is or how to get this going. And I, uh, just broke the ice by saying, I totally got this. If you need a hot, do I ever know how to do that? So since then I was the chef or the cook.
That's awesome. Yeah. What do you think is the most important thing that you do to keep yourself ready for this job? Is there something that you do that you think, hey, this is really critical and I don't ignore this and that's how I stay ready?
Yeah. For me, it's staying excited about going to work and keeping that motivation to go to work.
How do you do that?
I think it's more of an intrinsic thing. I want to be excited to do that next flight with that young person who's coming up to the point where they're going to go to an operational squadron. They're trying to learn the skills as best they can in a short amount of time and we're sending them into an environment that is absolutely unforgiving. The human performance and military aviation misses the mistakes that happen that nobody wants to have, but just do.
They're inevitable.
Physics, bad weather, all those things, they don't care. Those are just realities of life. And my motivation, the reason I wake up the morning and why I want to passionately teach people as best as I can is to help them in that moment when things go wrong and they feel confident that not just am I going to get through this, but am I going to thrive in a moment of adversity? That's what keeps me going in the morning.
You're talking about in your instructional role. How do you do that when it's 55 degrees and you're in the desert and life feels pretty tough?
Um, I simply thought about the people who needed us.
Similar, the job itself, the people you're going to help.
And yeah, it's got nothing to do with me. It's everything to do with how do I help you? Wow.
What is your coolest story?
We went from EBITDA to Wayne Wright for the umpteenth time. 10 zero degrees for 100 miles and you're there.
So what does that take you guys, like 3 hours?
No, 1 hour. Anyway, so we go there and we're working with an artillery unit and they're learning how to fire their 80 ones and drop it left or right or whatever using fire corrections from aircraft. It's our job to call those corrections. And we've got a flur ball. Like, we can use mark one eyeball and okay, left, right, up, down, whatever. But then we can use our floor ball. And we were initially just using our eyes and then when we moved this, um, surveillance ball on, we're able to look in infrared and do white hot or black hot or. You can use it in a regular color spectrum. And we started doing the color spectrum, and I say that that's cool. And then we said, I wonder how much shrapnel is flying around. We put it into white hot or black hot so we could see how much stuff is flying around. And we said, okay, drop it like it's hot. And they launched every tube max rounds as quickly as they could. And the amount of metal flying around the sky is not visible. And there's a lot of it. Oh, my God. And it doesn't look like anything in the movies at all.
Nowhere close from how do you explosions compare to what you see in a movie?
Oh, just nothing like that. There's no fire, there's no anything like that. It's just shrapnel it's rapidly. It's just boof. Yeah. Really cool to see.
What do you think makes a good pilot?
Uh, you check your ego at the door, you stay humble and be willing to learn and listen in every possible moment that you can, because there's no way you can make every mistake that everybody else has made. Yeah, I think that's a super key one.
I think that is huge. And conversely, a pilot who thinks they.
Know it all, I don't want to fly with them.
No, it's very off putting. People who can't take advice or are unwilling to learn from other people's experiences, or they aren't humble, they don't check their ego in the pilot world. I find that very uncomfortable. That's not a safe attitude.
I haven't found almost anybody that's like that.
They're very rare because those people don't typically succeed in professional aviation, certainly not to the high level that's required in the Air Force. Those kinds of people, I think, are typically weeded out because they don't have a personality that's well suited to aviation. And hopefully somebody at some point picks up on that well.
And the reason for that is aviation is a team sport. You got a flight engineer, you've got a doorground, or you've got an ASAP, you got a navigator, you've got a, uh, copilot. You need to be willing to listen and take every opportunity to learn from your mistakes and from the stories, the experiences of other people, and, uh, be a sponge. The second thing I think, that makes a really good aviator is someone who really deeply wants to learn how their team works, what their team knows, how to communicate better, how to learn from those other people's experiences. And it's not about you. It's about getting the job done with every available tool that you can. And the other people in your aircraft are incredibly valuable. Um, it's hard enough to figure out yourself, let alone other people, that vary from day to day, how to develop those. SOPs those common ways of communicating SOPs.
Are standard operating procedures that ensure all crews perform tasks in the same way. This ensures that crews who have not flown together before will be able to work together safely and effectively at short notice.
And when things are not easy, when it's 55 Celsius outside, when you haven't slept well, when all of these things pile on, or there's other stresses, do you come together for that common cause? Or do you just get frustrated and self center? There's no place for that second person. It takes time to develop that talent of overcoming those frustrations, to deal with what mission you've got and to make it happen. It takes time to learn how to do that.
Partly you're talking about learning the art of leadership or it sort of dovetails into that.
Yeah.
That it is a people based skill and it takes time to learn. Some people have a very innate ability for it. We sort of touched on that earlier, too. The importance of teamwork.
Right.
Where I talked about maintainers and things and if you can't work with your crew, like see you and on a crew aircraft, buddy, if you're not a.
Team player, you got no business being.
There you're just not going to succeed not only are you not going to succeed, you're going to drag back your team right? That's one of the things I loved about the Aurora is that you had a team of maybe a dozen on a flight or more if the flight is crowded, but typically around ten to twelve. And I loved working with everybody and learning from them. I learned some amazing things from ASOPs, who taught me about how radar works and all that kind of stuff. Shout out to Kevin Laffin for explaining to me all the different modes of radar before I had to do my upgrade to Crew Commander on the Pilot Project podcast. We always get anyone's permission before we use their name on the show. However, for the next question, we were unable to reach the person we were discussing because it generated excellent discussion on mentorship and leadership. We have redacted the name and kept the segment. Do you have anybody that stands out to you? As, like, kind of the shining example of what a tackle pilot should be?
I didn't have the opportunity to fly with him as much as I'd really like to, and he wasn't even a part of my flight when I was at the squadron. He's also out of DRCF the moment, but it was, uh, captain, and he was just even keeled all the time. When there were moments that I really needed to learn from. He was very direct, but supportive, would speak truth to power, and was a consummate professional. This guy was just he just knew how to do every aspect of the job. He was a great leader. I hope I can learn to do a lot of the things that he showed me.
We've talked about how there's, like, two sides of aviation, right? There's like the hard skills, there's like the hands and feet. And then there's the airmanship.
Yeah. And the leadership, I was going to say.
And the flip side of that coin is once you begin operating, not only is Airmanship important leadership and teamwork and the ability to motivate a team and how you treat the people around you and all these things, it's on those days that most people never have to deal with or the times of of immense pressure and stress that most people will not encounter. And then how are you still acting to the people around you? And and can you own it when you screw up and all those different things?
Yes.
Mentorship is, I think, the key to that.
It's important that when we have those mentorship opportunities because we don't have the depth of knowledge that we once did to have those water cooler conversations, that coffee, that pint, that talking over lunch, that we take every opportunity to talk about when things didn't go as we hoped they would or there was a planned reality mismatch. That is one of the biggest things that we need to do, at least in the aviation portion, to make sure that people don't make the same mistakes that we just did.
This last question is near and dear to the heart of this show because part of the point of this show, we're reaching out to those teenagers who want to be pilots, those young adults, those 20 year olds, whatever. The people who are just getting into aviation training, they've had maybe a little taste or they think this could be for them. So what I want to know is what would your advice be to a new pilot?
Be passionate about everything, as much as you can learn, as many conversations as you can have, as many old people that you can run into and ask for their experiences. Go talk with them. They've already lived the mistakes you haven't made yet, so you don't have to make those same, uh, mistakes. You might not live through all of their mistakes. They may have just got through it somehow by the skin of their teeth. So if they get lucky, you get smart. Yeah, I said it earlier in the show here. This is a career that is absolutely unforgiving. The human factors, mistakes that people don't intend to make, the physics of the environment in which we fly, or simply being thrown, some aircraft emergency that's not quite as per your checklist, they will catch up with you if you fly enough. So take all of those opportunities that those people who've come before you have already learned that they want to tell you about, but you might not be socially confident about. Man, there's nothing more that an old pilot wants to do than talk with a young pilot and swap some stories. And maybe it might just get you out of a hurt locker someday. So go talk, go learn, go have fun. Go be passionate about this strange environment that is unforgiving that you're getting yourself into early on.
You need to decide, is this a hobby or is this a career? Is this a hobby or is this a passion? If it's a hobby, go get your private pilot license and enjoy flying. And any flying is life and death. So you still need to be professional about it. But that's great, go enjoy that. But if you think this is your career and you want to be in the military, I completely agree with you. I have had flights where it gets the checklist item, and it's like, door secured. And part of that is you check four different things on the door and then, like, a fifth one. And I have had times where I thought, uh, you know what? I just closed the door, I forgot to check them, and I unstrap, go back, check the door, come back, say, sorry about that, door secured, and like, yeah, it's not great. Hopefully I don't do that every fight. But that's the level of I am going to care about everything I do that you need to do in the military if you're going to be an aviator. One last thing from Pete is Pete is involved in this awesome endeavor. Somebody that we know, Josh Cordery, started this wonderful organization called Eagles Wings. And I'm going to leave it to Pete to just give us a quick blurb on what that is and what it involves.
Eagles Wings Flight School is running out of, uh, Southport, Manitoba. And its mission is really to inspire youth to explore their innate gifts and build self confidence and develop some practical life skills through aviation training. It's not necessarily about getting a license, though. They can certainly do that if they like. This group really just wants to see young people transform their lives with hope and new beginnings for a successful future. And it's an amazing program because they avoid any issues of the economic barriers to getting into aviation or the social barriers that they could face as at risk aboriginal youth. It's just an awesome experience that Josh Cordiery, his wife Ashley, and a whole host of other people are putting out there. This is the third year that the program is running. I'm just so inspired by seeing these young people doing things that they didn't think they could before. A lot of them don't have their driver's license yet. In fact, I don't think this year that any of them have had their driver's license yet, and still they're going to learn how to fly an aircraft. It's confidence building. It's inspiring. Uh, it's a skill that none of their friends have at this age or may ever have. How awesome is it to be able to go and do that? I'm fortunate to be able to be participating now for the second or third year. And what a really cool program.
It's an amazing endeavor, and I'm really proud to know you guys who are doing that. And, uh, it's a great way to give back to our community, to care for our community. If anyone out there, uh, is interested in learning more, the website is Eagleswingsflightschool CA. It's located in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, and it's a wonderful program.
The last thing I just want to say is, Brian, uh, sincere thanks for having me. There's so much deviation to learn. There's so many opportunities as the world has. People retiring and needs more people who need to be professionals in this really difficult world that doesn't care whether or not you got a 90% on your test, that cares whether you put the gear down for landing. It's a tough world, it's an interesting world. It's something that's going to challenge you every day. Thanks for having me. I hope it's just a little bit of an eye opener for someone who is considering getting into, uh, doing this or at least understanding what it is that aviators do for Canada every day.
And thank you so much for being here today. Okay, that wraps things up for this episode on Tack Hill in Griffin's. Thanks so much for joining us. Our next episode will feature my good friend Ryan Finlater and he'll tell us all about his adventures flying the CC 138 Twin Otter in the Arctic. Ryan is a great guy with lots of cool stories, so make sure you check that one out. We're also getting closer to our discussion about training delays in the RCAF and what's being done to solve them, so stay tuned for that. Do you have questions or comments about anything you've heard or have a topic you'd like to hear covered on the show? Send us an email at ah, the pilotproject podcast at uh@gmail.com or reach out on social media at ah atpodpilotproject. As the podcast keeps growing, we still need your help with the big Three. Share with your friends like and follow us on social media and follow and rate us five stars wherever you get your podcasts. We thank you for your continued support. That's all for now. Thanks for listening. Keep the blue side up. See you.
Engineer shut down all four shutting down all four engines.